Being a Writer in Wales

Welsh Publishing Trends and Successes

As writers of promise and achievement have increasingly and more consistently emerged, it is no surprise that publishing in Wales has evolved to meet the uptake. Or should that be the other way round? The scene has certainly developed considerably over the last quarter of a century or so.

Since Seren sprang from Poetry Wales’s rib in 1981, it has developed a formidable back-catalogue, encompassing award-winning Poetry, Fiction, Literary Criticism, History, Memoir and Art books. Seren’s critical stock in poetry has continued to rise, not only within Wales with a strong presence in the Wales Book of the Year Award, but throughout the wider UK: a Costa Poetry Book of the Year win for John Haynes’s Letter to Patience, alongside the Somerset Maugham Award for Owen Sheers’s Skirrid Hill, frequent Forward Prize nominations, a Jerwood/Aldeburgh Best First Collection win and three consecutive nominations for the T S Eliot Prize. While Seren is renowned for its poetry, the Fiction list continues to grow, with a Whitbread Best First Novel shortlisting for Richard Collins’s The Land as Viewed by the Sea, and the McKitterick Prize for Lloyd Jones’s unique, ’gonzo picaresque’ Mr Vogel. Seren remains home to key Welsh poets such as Sheenagh Pugh, Christine Evans and Peter Finch, but it has also cast an eye over the border, netting the talents of Tim Liardet, Deryn Rees-Jones and Kate Bingham in the process.

In 1993, Lewis Davies founded the impressive and dazzlingly eclectic Parthian Books. Its frequently groundbreaking, idiosyncratic fiction has won broadsheet attention, awards and even achieved bestseller status with Richard Gwyn’s The Colour of a Dog Running Away. In recent years, the publisher has acquired some compelling new - and very young - Welsh talent in the shape of Orange Futures and inaugural EDS Dylan Thomas Prize winner Trezise, together with Matthew David Scott and Cynan Jones, who won the Betty Trask Award for The Long Dry in 2007. Not bad for a publishing house still in its teens. Latterly, Parthian has also begun to develop a very promising poetry list, with Jerwood Best First Collection Prize and Wales Book of the Year shortlistings for recent acquisitions Jasmine Donahaye and Ifor Thomas.

Such achievement should be considered in a UK context in an assessment of Wales’s new success. The average number of titles on the publishing schedule for Seren in a given year amounts to between 20-25, while Parthian averages 20. So an impressive strike rate for the two dominant forces in independent literary publishing in Wales, then, even more so when one considers their showing against the London-based commercial publishers. Such vital sense of possibility can only whet the appetite of our newest writers.

Alongside Seren and Parthian, Honno – founded in 1986 by a collective dedicated to publishing the work of Welsh women or women who have a connection to Wales – continues its success with a catalogue of authors including Jo Mazelis (Wales Book of the Year nominee), Catherine Merriman and bestselling crime writer Lindsay Ashford. It remains true to its mission statement of the promotion of women’s writing from Wales, with regular calls for open submission to anthologies and the laudable reprint of important classics such as Lily Tobias’s Eunice Fleet and Menna Gallie’s Strike for a Kingdom. Gomer publishes a wide range of titles in English, all with a strong Welsh dimension. Over at Accent Press, a various list of Fiction and Non-Fiction is a testimony to an editorial vision defined by quality but also mainstream interest and commercial ambition. With the foundation and development of Cinnamon Press for Poetry and Fiction, alongside Y Lolfa’s new imprint for Fiction in English (edited by Parthian’s one-time Fiction Editor, Gwen Davies), and beautifully produced short story anthologies, Micro-fiction and Poetry from Leaf Books, Welsh publishing in English is becoming increasingly open to not simply a diverse new body of Welsh authors, established and new, but also responsive to a wider-ranging popular and critical taste.

Meanwhile, magazines such as Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review and Planet continue to flourish and raise the level of literary, cultural and political debate, offering a place for new writing to find its way out into the open, not simply in Wales but the wider world, as well. With all magazines under fresh editorship, it will be interesting to see what directions they will now take over the coming years, and how they will tackle the challenging agenda that continues to be set by a dynamic and diverse literary scene. For the smaller magazines, times admittedly remain tough - not simply in Wales but also throughout the wider UK. As any editor could tell you, the number of contributors to the smaller magazines still strangely far exceeds the number of actual paying customers. Much can and should be made of the fact that if the number of submissions to the smaller magazines even loosely equated with sales figures, the future for such outlets would be much more stable. But despite the climate, in Wales, the good smaller magazines, such as Skald and Roundyhouse do endure. 2006 saw the final edition of Cambrensis, a showcase exclusively for short stories, after two decades of publication. But soon enough came the arrival of the rather more edgily titled, if somewhat smaller, Blue Tattoo, founded by Dafydd Prys, an assistant editor at Planet. Ambitious and eclectic, recent contributors have included Raymond Humphreys, Anna Wigley, Niall Griffiths and Leonora Brito.

While the outlook within Wales is itself encouraging, inevitably independent publishing is always subject to the economic drivers – and most keenly for those presses dominated by a literary rather than commercial ‘flavour’. At the same time, some Welsh writers who have emerged through the independent presses of Wales, such as Tristan Hughes or Samantha Wynne Rhydderch, brought on by Parthian and Seren respectively, are now making moves into UK commercial publishing - in both their cases, finding a new home at Picador. It would seem a loss. And yet it is precisely such ‘mobility’ which offers us proof of a healthy publishing eco-system. It has always been the job of the independent publisher to bring on talent and roll the dice, and even more so in these hard-nosed times of profit margins and spin. Writers sometimes move on. No doubt, publishers watch them leave with a heavy heart. But in a lively climate generating a steady stream of new talent, mobility can also be enabling, particularly given the constraints on independent publishing schedules. The truth is that independent publishers within Wales couldn’t possibly continue to market and publish new work if existing lists remained static. And it goes without saying that the increased mobility of writers from Wales brings with it the advantage of a higher visibility again for Welsh writing as a whole throughout the wider UK.